


Set Patterns

by langsdelijn



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Bad Decisions, Brocedes, M/M, Reference to Mutually Violent/Aggressive Sex, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 10:03:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5412671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/langsdelijn/pseuds/langsdelijn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lewis realises he's tired of this thing with Nico but he isn't ready to give him up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Set Patterns

Lewis wonders why they both keep going back to this, to resentful recriminations and rough loveless kisses and bruises and scratches and bite marks that sting in the shower the next morning.  
  
It doesn’t happen at every race but they do it more often than not now. Nico comes to his room or he goes to Nico’s and the clothes come off wordlessly and they rut mechanically and throughout they never say a word to each other that isn’t an accusation, an insult or a twisted promise, a threat.  
  
He knows, and he knows Nico knows, that there’s nothing good that can possibly come from this but neither of them can seem to stop. He remembers the first time they did this, after Malaysia and team orders and the podium; he knew it was a mistake even then, but only after. He knew it would be a mistake as he sought Nico out after he had to retire from Australia. He knew it was a mistake every time he opened the door to let Nico in and every time he stood in front of another door waiting to be let in himself.  
  
Every time he let it or made it happen he knew it was the wrong choice to make.  
  
Because he’d regret it in the morning when all it left him was hurt and aching and empty and he spent too long in the shower washing the previous night off him even though he knew he would feel it for days. Because with every new encounter the thread that held them together frayed a little bit further and it was already wearing thin.  
  
(Because sometimes, when he was in the shower the next morning, he imagined Nico in the same circumstances and it made him all at once ashamed, angry, and unpleasantly aroused and he ended up frustratedly jerking off to the aftermath of this fucked up thing between them and it made him feel irrevocably tainted by it, because before this there had been kisses in the dark and fleeting smiles and that had always been enough.)  
  
He knows, and he suspects Nico does too, that they’re coming up on the point of no return when something will break and things between them will be irreparably damaged. He’s tired, too, but that only comes back to him afterwards, he’s so lost in this routine during, caught up in the spiral of desperate anger and unthinking lust and old resentments that whirls around them until he can longer tell which are his and which Nico’s.  
  
He’s tired, he realises. He’s tired of this and he wants it to stop, this complicated ceremony of silence while they lie here together and the whole miserable thing.  
  
He sits up, feels the bruises on his arms and the scrapes from the wall on his back and the afterimage of Nico inside him. ‘What are we doing, Nico?’ he asks and even to his ears his voice is a ringing breach of protocol—in here they are not supposed to talk, no room for communication.  
  
Nico doesn’t reply. Lewis turns to look at him. He’s staring up at the ceiling. An angry red mark stands out on his right forearm where he bit him. He remembers wanting that to hurt and it must; he drew blood in places. Lewis looks away. ‘I mean it, Nico,’ he says, ‘what are we doing?’  
  
‘I don’t know,’ Nico admits eventually. He shifts, edges back so he can sit up against the wall. Lewis hears him, feels his movement through the matrass, sees it from the corner of his eye. No need to look back.  
  
A hand traces over his back, trailing wetness in its wake. ‘You’re bleeding,’ Nico says.  
  
‘So are you.’  
  
The hand disappears. Lewis does look this time: Nico is examining the wound on his arm as if he has only now realised it’s there and how it got there. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says but he doesn’t bother with meaningless platitudes because he had meant to hurt him and he won’t lie about that.  
  
‘Yeah,’ Nico says. He touches Lewis’ shoulder and then he moves down, drawing a pattern around the worst of the cuts. ‘So am I. I knew that would hurt.’ Two of his fingers carefully run down the raised edges of one of them. ‘I wanted it to,’ he adds softly.  
  
And it had, the surface of the wall had been rough and sharp; sanding down his skin with its every movement against it. It’s not news to him that had been deliberate. ‘I know.’ Lewis wonders if there’s blood on the wall, like there must be in the sheets, like his blood is on the fingers of Nico’s right hand if not elsewhere on his body.  
  
‘I did too,’ he admits, not that that can come as much of a surprise either. ‘All I wanted was to hurt you.’ He doesn’t have the taste of Nico’s blood in his mouth but his teeth still broke skin. ‘I think maybe we should do something about that,’ he adds, thinking of half-remembered advice on the dangers of human bites.  
  
Nico agrees to it so Lewis fetches the first aid kit. He squirts a generous helping of antiseptic on a gauze dressing for lack of a cloth and reaches for Nico’s arm, wincing at the sight of his handiwork, a set of two red semicircles already showing the promise of a wicked bruise with regular depressions dotted with a pattern of darker red stains. Lewis methodically cleans the wound and fits another square of gauze over it, which he fixes with a roll of bandage when he discovers he doesn’t have any tape.  
  
It takes him some time to get the clips to take because the angle is a little awkward. ‘Let me,’ Nico says when he’s done and settles in behind him without waiting for an answer. Lewis hears him slide the box closer. Nico rummages around in it, snaps open the bottle and tears open another square of gauze. He starts at Lewis’ left shoulder and meticulously wipes down each of the scrapes and cuts in turn.  
  
Halfway across to his right shoulder, Nico stops. He prepares another square. ‘I do know,’ he says, when he gets back to work. ‘Why I kept going back to you, I mean. And it wasn’t what you probably think, it wasn’t to—to… It was the only way, you know, but not to…,’ he trails off.  
  
Lewis waits a few moments to ask. ‘It was the only way to what?’  
  
‘It was the only way I could be close to you.’ Nico laughs ruefully. ‘I don’t know why it always… habit, I suppose, from last year.’  
  
‘What are you… Are you saying—what?’  
  
‘We weren’t talking and you still let me in after Spa.’  
  
Oh, yes, Spa. Lewis remembers that, the cool fury that built in him, walking out of the latest crisis meeting to a wall of press and sharing all of the little things Nico said about the incident, how he basked in Nico’s aggrieved resentment and pressed him into the sheets and made him feel but how hollow that supposed victory had felt later on when he realised it was what he’d wanted him to do, how ridiculous it suddenly felt to consider that any kind of victory at all. Habit.  
  
Jesus.  
  
‘I don’t know,’ Lewis says, and there’s no point in specifying because there are so many things he means. ‘It was always worse in the morning. I hated it and I knew I would but I couldn’t stop.’ It sounds ridiculous when he says it, so he plaintively adds, ‘At least you had an actual reason.’  
  
‘Are we fighting over who’s worse in this now?’ Nico asks. ‘Because in that case, I raise with “I initiated most of the time but I knew it was wrong” and I feel that’s got you beat.’  
  
‘I bit you,’ Lewis points out. He realises he sounds petulant about it but he remembers that he’d bit down as hard he could with no other desire than to hurt and—and that seems worse the more he thinks about it.  
  
Nico scoffs. ‘And I did… this to your back before you bit me, so do I win?’ His hand disappears from Lewis’ back for a moment so Lewis presumes he’s gesturing to himself.  
  
‘I let you.’  
  
‘Wow,’ Nico mutters. ‘You are really determined to turn this into a competition. What does it matter?’  
  
Lewis doesn’t reply because he’s afraid of the answer.  
  
But the two of them know each other inside and out, that’s how this could have got so bad, and given time and enough clues, Nico can puzzle him out and vice versa. ‘What?’ he asks. ‘Tell me.’  
  
He waits for Lewis to speak and sighs when he realises he isn’t going to. ‘Fine. Whatever. Do you want to know why I….’ Lewis knows what he means, he doesn’t have to hear the rest of the sentence for that, not when it’s this obvious.  
  
And he’s almost, almost tempted to throw that back in Nico’s face in the crudest terms he can come up with to make him back off. But he doesn’t even though he doesn’t especially care to learn Nico’s reasoning. ‘If I say no, will that stop you?’  
  
‘I was… this is going to sound ridiculous, alright, but I—you—I wanted—’  
  
Lewis decides in Nico’s next hesitation that he truly doesn’t want to know. ‘I thought I needed this,’ he admits before Nico can find the right words to tell him. He waits.  
  
‘Yeah,’ Nico says. ‘Me too.’  
  
‘I…,’ he starts to say, then stops, because confessing to this could break the fragile truce they established.  
  
Nico gently touches his other hand to his shoulder. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘let’s just… drop it, yeah?’  
  
Lewis nods. It could be Nico’s right and none of this matters anymore and it is better they get on with this and stop lingering on this thing, this series of mistakes, but he almost feels like they have to work through this somehow, have to talk it out to get it out of the way in order to move on.  
  
‘Hey,’ Nico says again. ‘Lewis, hey.’  
  
I don’t know, Lewis thinks, should we? But he doesn’t say that; he says, instead, ‘Yeah, okay. Alright.’  
  
After that for a while, neither of them speaks. Nico continues his work in silence and Lewis lets him, lost in thought.  
  
‘Just about done,’ Nico announces, as his hands fall away again and he rummages around in Lewis’ first aid kit again. ‘Oh, cool,’ he muses, like this, here, is something that it’s not, ‘you have plaster spray. Excellent.’  
  
Lewis shrugs. Is it that bad? He knows he was bleeding but it still is a surprise to him that Nico thinks this necessary.  
  
‘Hold still.’  
  
It stings, more so than the antiseptic, more so than the insistent ache so typical of the kind of shallow cuts he must have adorning his back, and Lewis has to bite down on a hiss of pain. He doesn’t want Nico to know how much it hurts, doesn’t want him to stop. He doesn’t even know why anymore. He wants Nico near.  
  
Lewis turns back to Nico once he’s done (the stretch of the plaster on his skin feels odd, like there’s threads that span up and down his back) and watches him as he neatly clears everything away, not looking at him. ‘Stay,’ Lewis says, wondering if he should.  
  
‘What?’  
  
‘Stay here,’ he repeats. ‘Please.’  
  
Nico stills, hesitates. ‘Are you sure?’  
  
He’s not, but he wants him to all the same. ‘No,’ he admits, trailing a hand up Nico’s arm—Nico stares, watches this point of contact between them, gaze fixed and focussed. ‘But I don’t want to be alone.’ And, God, he’s so tired of being alone, but that one’s not something he can admit, and especially not to Nico. It would mean too much. ‘Please stay.’  
  
‘Yeah,’ Nico eventually whispers, ‘yeah, if you want.’ He settles down behind Lewis on the bed and pulls him close, arms securely closing around his waist, and it doesn’t immediately feel comforting or familiar (there is still, unsurprisingly perhaps, a part of him that cannot relax around Nico) but Nico feels warm and solid at his back and that’s better, he has to believe, than not having this. It has to be.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this was supposed to be angsty and terrible and then it got talky and sad and weird.


End file.
